End of Maroc - Enter Paris

Morocco is over, we’re currently flying to Paris in our smallest group thus far; Brett, Jacko and I. Won’t last long as we meet up with Martin and La in Paris and will stay with them until Amsterdam. As for the rest of Marrakech I think Morocco really grew on me.

Once you get over the sickness and get used to the sometimes frustrating cultural differences it was a pretty enjoyable co

untry; though I wouldn’t choose to spend extended time there. It was really good to see Crissy and Byron but we didn’t really end up spending all that much time together as all us lads went on a little expedition to the Sahara. With our limited time we decided on two days, one night.

We started early with breakfast at 6:30; trey early for holiday mode. Fortunately our van was the same Hyundai we’d had in Fes; we would need this comfort for the 10 hours of driving each day. It was the five of us and one couple whom appeared roughly 30; very nice people, the guy Jess was American and his girlfriend Celia was Spanish. Celia is however living in Paris at the moment and we’re hoping to meet up with them whilst we’re here. The drive was glorious, passed through such a wide variety of incredible scenery it was phenomenal

.

I’m not sure there would be too many if any other places in the world where you can go from snow topped mountains (and it did snow abit when we were driving through) too desert landscape in a matter of hours. Interestingly we only covered about 400km, but the roads are winding and not always that good condition, mix this with a pretty slow (careful which we were grateful for at points) driver and lorries using these same roads and it becomes more understandable.

So at the end of this days driving we trek the final two hours ever so ungracefully via camel. It was a fun experience and a necessity of course, visiting the Sahara desert you’ve got to include a camel ride in the package; gladly this means I can skip this in the future. They seem like great animals but they really prefer lying down and are rather uncomfortable after about half an hour. Crissy and Byron had shown me pictures from their trip into the desert which they’d done before meeting us in Marrakech, this really got my hopes up for what our campsite would be like at night. They were surrounded by sand dunes all around, this appealed. So as we were plodding along for longer and longer and less and less comfortably on our camels it was seeming very unlikely we would make it too such a remote destination. Suspicions were confirmed but care was lost once presented with a great big Tagine for dinner. In actual fact we were quite isolated at the campsite, surrounded by dunes of up to 3 metres in size! (sarcasm present) It was a very nice night as only one other couple joined our tight unit making for an intimate performance from the local guides looking after us. They played the bongo’s and sang in Arabic and it was all very pleasant. And we slept.

As the sun rose Martins birthday (21^st) and Australia day came with it. We were able to treat him somewhat by shouting him a quad bike ride. Brett, Dean, Baranovic and I did the ride but due to time restraints we could only fit in half an hour. It was still awesome fun to be in control of a transport machine. Was pretty funny sight to drive past camels and donkeys on the road, then once we got onto the dirt it was sick trying to get the back out. With more time you can go to the proper big dunes, up to 300m the guy said. This got us all very excited and I want to cover desert on a quad bike or motorbike pretend Dakar rally style; we had a revelation when we were discussing the Sahara desert the whole time that perhaps we could do something similar in the Simpson Desert and see Australia for once.

The rest of the time in Marrakech was spent either eating or searching for bargains in the Souks (narrow and overcrowded shopping alleys). We had lots of great finds with the food, I was over the moon just being able to eat and not feel sick.

Now in Paris, currently sitting in a KFC using the free wifi so i might take the opportunity to put this up..